Logging in to 4BR

Has anyone noticed that you now have to log in to 4BR if you want to listen to the audio news/interviews?

Any idea why they would suddenly ask users to do this? (and before anyone asks, yes I have emailed them to ask!) The only reason I can see to want to collect users email addresses is to send them spam, which I have no intention of signing up for. Reading the text on the signup page it looks as though fairly soon you will have to log in to send comments in as well.

In the early days of the web registering your details with anyone you wanted to do business with was unnecessary but that has all changed now, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the reasons are purely commercial, as you suggest.

Another development in recent times has been the increasing use of animated adverts on all sorts of websites - Amazon, Ebay etc. - which has the effect of slowing everything down. The system is slowly collapsing under the weight of advertising.

It also occurs to me that this should probably be seen in conjunction with 4BarsRest's recent appeal to its readership for money (which, knowing the traditional parsimony of bandsmen,was probably not very successful).

Websites like 4BR cannot ultimately run on thin air. Exactly this point was being made only last week by none other than Rupert Murdoch, who brought up the possibility that online newspapers will soon cease to be free - the Wall Street Journal already charges a subscription and has shown that the model works. Mr Murdoch has been proved right on other commercial matters in the past, and I think he will be right on this one too. 4BR is under exactly the same sort of commercial pressure.

The only reason I can see to want to collect users email addresses is to send them spam, which I have no intention of signing up for.

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It's easy to get paranoid about this sort of thing. Remember this isn't a general market -the brass band community and the suppliers advertising on 4BR would be classed as a niche market, and one that knows its potential customers well I suspect.
In other words, both 4BR themselves and their advertisers would be well aware that the brass band community would react very badly to being spammed as a result of registering

In the near future we hope to make the site more interactive, so that people can comment directly on individual news items as well as through the comments section - making it more responsive to breaking news.

This method makes it possible for us to be able to edit potentially libelous comment etc quickly and effectively and to stop people from adding comment annonymously.

It will not be a method of raising cash or making the site pay per view or anything like that we can assure you. 4BR will always remain a free site.

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I assume the interactive commenting will be along the lines of the BBC site, where you can add a comment to a news or magazine story. I could imagine them falling foul of the same sort of trolling that takes place on here from time to time, hence the need to make people register and log in?